Overall mortality rates from cancer have "heald steady" largely due to better understanding (gained from science) of what diseases people are actually suffering from when they die and the fact that we're living long enough to suffer from diseases that kill just about everyone when they're old. The #1 cause of death pre-1950 was "natural causes". 95% of those deaths are now classified as cancer, heart disease and stroke. Prostate cancer wasn't a recognized cause of death until about 20 years ago.

For a very significant percentage of the population, the cancer rate has dropped dramatically. See this URL for more data: http://www.healthgoods.com/Education/Health_Information/Cancer_Rates_and_Risks/cancer_mortality_in_US.htm

We could drop the overall cancer rate by over 1/3 if people simply quit smoking. The #1 type of cancer that causes death is lung cancer (followed closely by breast and prostate). 90% of lung cancer cases are a direct result of smoking. How do we know smoking causes cancer? Science.

What about the HPV vaccine? Nearly 100% effective. Will reduce cancer mortality rates by 6 percentage points among women.

I'm open to the idea that a lot of science is making discoveries at what we'd call "the fringes" - clarifying how the bigger theories fit into small niches. But that's always been true. Once you "discover" America, there's no more America to discover. That doesn't mean you can't still walk across the country, or map the mountains, or explore the caverns. When you're done with all that, you go to the moon. Then Mars.

But the author doesn't seem open to the idea that a paradigm shift in, say, the way diseases are viewed may create whole new avenues to disease cures that no one is even thinking about now. To think we know it all because it's been 60 years since quantum mechanics was discovered is just silly. Science is open-ended exploration, by its very nature. Not every scientist is currently practicing such basic, open-ended research (many are working in for-profit places, which limits the scope of their work), but that's not an indictment of science's ability to make progress.

John Horgan says in his article "Today, many people who cannot believe in God have faith instead in the myth of scientific progress. Faith in science is vitally important; without it, scientists would not have come so far so fast. But when this faith can be sustained only by shunning contradictory evidence and arguments, it violates the scientific spirit."

This argument rings false for several reasons. Firstly, faith in science is not what's sustaining it. Repeatable experiments with predicatble results are what keep it going.

As previous letters have stated, cancer rates have been dropping in this country in many areas. Breast cancers are being detected and treated earlier, lung cancers are being prevented through education. Actual science rather than faith in science is causing these declines. When faith healers can join antibiotics in being effective at curing bacterial infections, you can start talking about faith sustaining science.

Whether science is making the world a better place can be debated. Are people happier today than they were a thousand years ago? Probably not. But you can't argue against the fact that we have a greater understanding of our bodies and our environment than at any other time in history.

If you're going to make a case against false science, go ahead. But to make a case against science in general is to ignore thousands of years of actual results.